Yuka Fujii (University of Tokyo)

Monday 19 November 2012, NOON
Pratt Conference Room, 60 Garden Street

Recent discoveries of exoplanets have implied a number of
Earth-size/super-Earth-size exoplanets in so-called habitable zones,
which stimulates our expectation for planets harboring life outside
the Solar System. While the detection of small planets in the HZ itself is
an essential first step, further investigations are needed to know
their properties in detail. A key approach is direct detection of
their light separated from the host star. Indeed several proposals for
direct imaging observations, both space-based and ground-based, are
being actively discussed. Even with the aid of such future instruments,
however, it is not straightforward to decipher the signals, because the
information accessible via astronomical observation is inevitably limited. In
particular, exoplanets are point sources to us and only disk-integrated
light would be available. In this talk, I discuss the methods to recover
the maps of continents, ocean, and/or clouds from the time variation
of planetary color caused by spin rotation and/or orbital motion. I also
examine the variation of spectral absorption features as a probe of
clouds and the water cycle.